Remains of the Day

Socialism

The New Yorker examines McCain and Palin's criticism of Barack Obama as a socialist and finds in it a bit of hypocritical name-calling between pot and kettle. McCain himself came out in support of the same tax structure as Obama in 2000.

Of course, all taxes are redistributive, in that they redistribute private resources for public purposes. But the federal income tax is (downwardly) redistributive as a matter of principle: however slightly, it softens the inequalities that are inevitable in a market economy, and it reflects the belief that the wealthy have a proportionately greater stake in the material aspects of the social order and, therefore, should give that order proportionately more material support. McCain himself probably shares this belief, and there was a time when he was willing to say so. During the 2000 campaign, on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” a young woman asked him why her father, a doctor, should be “penalized” by being “in a huge tax bracket.” McCain replied that “wealthy people can afford more” and that “the very wealthy, because they can afford tax lawyers and all kinds of loopholes, really don’t pay nearly as much as you think they do.” The exchange continued:

YOUNG WOMAN: Are we getting closer and closer to, like, socialism and stuff?. . .

MCCAIN: Here’s what I really believe: That when you reach a certain level of comfort, there’s nothing wrong with paying somewhat more.

As for Sarah Palin...

She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.

I don't mind the accusations of socialism; they're certainly more palatable than the not-so-subtle hints that Obama might be a terrorist. It's to be expected of the trailing side in a Presidential Election to try various angles of attack, and as noted in this past Sunday's NY Times Magazine feature on McCain's campaign, the Straight Talk Express has driven all over the map in attempting to find an effective narrative to frame its candidate as preferable to Obama in a time when voters crave change.

Movie trailers on Hulu

We (I use the royal We now when referring to Hulu) added a section of our site for movie trailers today. More to come, but having not been to the movies recently, I feel out of the loop on what's coming. For example, this trailer for Valkyrie, apparently based on a true story. Tom Cruise tried to kill Hitler--who knew?

In watching the latest Harry Potter trailer, I was reminded of a recent talk given by Brad Bird at Skirball here in LA. They offer a series in which luminaries come in to speak and screen a movie of their choice. Bird had chosen to screen Dr. Zhivago, an epic romance, since he's writing and directing a live action epic romance of his own, 1906, about the earthquake and fire in San Francisco in said year. (Brad Bird moving to live action--who knew? Not me, I'm oblivious to all but the latest poll numbers. Nov. 5 can't come quickly enough)

Bird noted that he preferred the Lord of the Rings trilogy over the Harry Potter movies because the former honored the spirit of the books whereas the latter attempted to hew to the literal word. Movies and books are different mediums, something I strongly agree with, and have very different strengths.

His favorite of the Harry Potter movies was the third, the same choice as most every person I've spoken to. I have not read any Harry Potter books other than the first, and perhaps that's aided my enjoyment of the movies.

Something my old roommate and movie buff Scott said about trailers has always stuck with me: they are a brutish art form. That said, they are useful case studies in the art of condensed storytelling.

lala

It's a bit hard to tell many of the new online music services apart, from Pandora to Last.fm to iLike and so on. Lala adds a bit of a twist. It's a streaming music service that lets you play any of its 6 million tracks once for free, and $0.10 to unlock it for unlimited future online playing. The twist is that it will also search your own music library, and if any of your tracks are in its 6 million track library, those will be unlocked for unlimited online streaming as well. So instead of having to keep your home computer on all the time to act as your music server, you can save some electricity bills and just stream your music from lala through a browser.

It's one step closer to the universal music locker online, an idea which has seemingly been batted around for years now. The main problem right now is that 6 million tracks is not that large a selection for anyone with reasonably diverse musical tastes, so it's far from an endgame. But the concept is appealing.

It's not the tool, it's the craftsman

Alex Majoli is a Magnum photographer who has shot in China, the Congo, and Iraq, and he has won honors like U.S. National Press Photographers Association's Best of Photojournalism Magazine Photographer of the Year Award (boy do they need an acronym).

His tool of choice? A simple Olympus digital point and shoot.

Some of his photos and some elaboration on his techniques here.

What's so bad about energy dependence?

David Henderson punches economic holes in both McCain and Obama's calls for energy independence.

Energy “dependence” is much cheaper. In fact, the case for being “dependent” on other countries for oil is the same as the case for being dependent on other countries for bananas or coffee. At some tariff-protected price, the United States could be self-sufficient in bananas or coffee. If the price were high enough, someone would grow bananas and coffee plants in greenhouses. But why would we want that? Why would we want to pay more for coffee and bananas than we need to? Another way of saying that we would pay more is that we would give up more of our resources (capital, labor, and land) to have domestic bananas and coffee than we now give up by producing other things with these resources and using the proceeds to buy coffee and bananas more cheaply abroad. We would be poorer. The reasoning doesn’t change when the good is oil. By preventing people from importing oil, either with a ban on imports or a tariff on oil, the government would make us poorer.

Or think of it another way. Do you ever take your shirts to the local cleaner to be washed? If so, you are “dependent” on the cleaner. You could wash your shirts yourself, but you don’t. The reason you don’t is that your time is more valuably used producing other things, some of which you sell, and using some of the proceeds to pay the cleaner.

Further elaboration, from a Henderson post at Econlog.

Many people think oil is different in one other fundamental way: they think we are vulnerable because countries that send us oil might cut us off. Sure enough, when I laid this out in class last week during a discussion of trade barriers, one of my students quoted Senator McCain's statement that in buying as much oil from abroad as we do, "we are sending $700 billion a year to people who hate us." (Actually, McCain's usual version is "don't like us very much." I believe, although I couldn't find it on the web, that I've heard McCain use the word "hate.") I answered that I don't think Canadians hate us that much. (It comes as a surprise to most people that we import more oil from Canada than from any other country. Mexico and Saudi Arabia vie for second.) I also think that many of these foreigners hate our government more than they hate us. Most of the polling data of other countries' citizens' views of America are not about their views of Americans but of their views of the U.S. government. This is a distinction, by the way, that Americans seem to have trouble making. But I also pointed out that even if we take McCain's statement as true, notice what McCain is saying: Even countries that hate us want to sell us oil. To paraphrase Adam Smith, it is not from the benevolence of the Saudi Arabian or Venezuelan producers that we fill our gas tanks, but from their regard for their own self-interest. Indeed, this statement of McCain goes further than Adam Smith. In Adam Smith's world, the butcher, baker, or brewer might have been indifferent to you or only mildly liked you. But McCain's statement illustrates Gary Becker's point that free markets break down discrimination: you might hate that guy who wants your product, but you love yourself and your family, and so you sell it to him.

Netflix Instant Play finally available for Macs

Via Microsoft Silverlight. Rolls out tomorrow and requires Intel-chipped Macs.

The Onion = Nostradamus

Article from Jan 17, 2001 The Onion: "Bush: Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over."

Bush swore to do "everything in [his] power" to undo the damage wrought by Clinton's two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.

During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.

"You better believe we're going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration," said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. "Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?"

...

"Finally, the horrific misrule of the Democrats has been brought to a close," House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert (R-IL) told reporters. "Under Bush, we can all look forward to military aggression, deregulation of dangerous, greedy industries, and the defunding of vital domestic social-service programs upon which millions depend. Mercifully, we can now say goodbye to the awful nightmare that was Clinton's America."

...

"We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two," Bush said. "Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there's much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation's hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it."

To think I laughed at the time. Please let this long tragicomedy end.

Electoral College

In the NY Times op-ed piece Blue State Blues, Gail files the latest installment in what seems like a U.S. Presidential Election year tradition, the rant against the Electoral College. I agree. The marginal value of a vote in Ohio or Florida is worth too much more than a vote in states that nearly always go blue or red when deciding our future President. It's a wonder so many voters in those states, like California, New York, or Texas, even bother.

This isn't just a hulu hoop, it's the circle of life

One more season of Mad Men done tonight, and we settle in for another long wait for the next season, keeping our fingers crossed that Matthew Weiner will be back.

Jon Hamm hosted SNL yesterday, and to nobody's surprise participated in a Mad Men segment. The best bit was the moment spoofing Don Draper's legendary pitches, which are my favorite part of Mad Men. Here it is, complete with music lifted straight from the Kodak Carousel pitch from the final episode of season one.

Robocall compilation

McCain's campaign is running robocalls and TV ads in a variety of key battleground states. They are, if not sleazy, then at least dishonest. TPM has a good compilation of which ones are running in which states, along with audio or video files for some of them.

When asked to defend the robocalls, McCain said that they were absolutely accurate.

After having been savaged by robocalls by the Bush campaign in 2000, McCain has chosen to fulfill a screenwriter's dream by turning to the same tactic in his own bid for power. There is a Greek tragedy here just ripe for a made-for-tv movie in, say, mid-2009.

Sure, these robocalls appeal to some of his base, but most independent voters are seeing right through these for what they are, just as Colin Powell and others have in endorsing Obama.

If there has been a positive result in this election it's that the crucible of the campaign trail has revealed the characters of both candidates and drawn a sharp contrast between them. This election has shrunk McCain before our very eyes. The wisdom of the Palin pick has followed a Flowers for Algernon trajectory.

My other curiosity about robocalls: people sit through these? I detest being bothered by human telemarketers but ironically feel insulted when they can't even pay for a human to do the job, leaving it to a recording. As soon as I detect the unnatural pause that indicates a recording kicking in, I hang up.

Wassup

A tv commercial, updated.

Negative ads, a long and distinguished history

If you think today's political ads are negative, check out some historical political tv ads. Here, for example, is perhaps the most famous ad of all time, the Daisy Girl ad, created by the ad agency DDB and run just once on TV by Lyndon B. Johnson against Barry Goldwater.

LBJ crushed Goldwater in the election.

Of course, while McCain hasn't shown an ad with Obama flying a plane into the Empire State Building, we still have a week and a half to go and McCain just had his worst polling day yet. If the McCain campaign goes that route, I suggest Obama run an ad of McCain wandering around the White House in his pajamas, drooling and mumbling incoherently, while elsewhere Palin stands in her enormous walk-in closet flipping through one of several hundred designer suits mumbling, "Ooh, you betcha!"

Warren Buffett on the economic crisis

As usual, a voice of sanity with the credibility of billions of dollars behind him.

Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn’t. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value. Indeed, the policies that government will follow in its efforts to alleviate the current crisis will probably prove inflationary and therefore accelerate declines in the real value of cash accounts.

Equities will almost certainly outperform cash over the next decade, probably by a substantial degree. Those investors who cling now to cash are betting they can efficiently time their move away from it later. In waiting for the comfort of good news, they are ignoring Wayne Gretzky’s advice: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.”

I don’t like to opine on the stock market, and again I emphasize that I have no idea what the market will do in the short term. Nevertheless, I’ll follow the lead of a restaurant that opened in an empty bank building and then advertised: “Put your mouth where your money was.” Today my money and my mouth both say equities.

My weekend in Nevada

I am as exhausted as I've been in a long time having just returned from a long weekend of canvassing and rallying for Obama in Las Vegas. Nevada has traditionally leaned red, and it went to Bush in 2000 and 2004. Polls shows a near coin toss right now in Nevada. Its five electoral votes may not mean much, but just as a symbol, we (I use the royal we, my support for Obama being no secret) would desperately love to win it this time around.

It was an eventful and exciting weekend for team Obama:

• The Chicago Tribune endorsed Obama. Growing up in Chicago, I was used to seeing their blue masthead bleed red election after election, so this endorsement is a pleasant surprise.

  Many Americans say they're uneasy about Obama. He's pretty new to them.

  We can provide some assurance. We have known Obama since he entered politics a dozen years ago. We have watched him, worked with him, argued with him as he rose from an effective state senator to an inspiring U.S. senator to the Democratic Party's nominee for president.

  We have tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions. He is ready.

  The change that Obama talks about so much is not simply a change in this policy or that one. It is not fundamentally about lobbyists or Washington insiders. Obama envisions a change in the way we deal with one another in politics and government. His opponents may say this is empty, abstract rhetoric. In fact, it is hard to imagine how we are going to deal with the grave domestic and foreign crises we face without an end to the savagery and a return to civility in politics.

  -----------------------

  This endorsement makes some history for the Chicago Tribune. This is the first time the newspaper has endorsed the Democratic Party's nominee for president.

  ...

  McCain failed in his most important executive decision. Give him credit for choosing a female running mate--but he passed up any number of supremely qualified Republican women who could have served. Having called Obama not ready to lead, McCain chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. His campaign has tried to stage-manage Palin's exposure to the public. But it's clear she is not prepared to step in at a moment's notice and serve as president. McCain put his campaign before his country.
  

  Obama chose a more experienced and more thoughtful running mate--he put governing before politicking. Sen. Joe Biden doesn't bring many votes to Obama, but he would help him from day one to lead the country.
  

• Colin Powell endorsed Obama this morning. It was once thought that he might be the first African-American to be President, but it was not to be. But his part in this saga was still to be played, and today was that day. Ken texted me from the East Coast at around 9am PST: "Powell endosed Obama on MtP." It was the perfect start to the morning and fired up the volunteer team for the morning rally in Chinatown.

  Republican former House speaker Newt Gingrich said on ABC's "This Week": "What that just did in one sound bite -- and I assume that sound bite will end up in an ad -- is it eliminated the experience argument. How are you going to say the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, former national security adviser, former secretary of state was taken in?"

• Obama raised $150 million in September!
• Someone was indeed trying to manipulate the prediction market Intrade to boost McCain's numbers.

It's often written that the Republican ground game won them the White House in 2000 and 2004. The terminology similarity to football is not the only apt comparison. As in football, where the ground game tends to grind out yards, three, four at a time, the ground game in politics is hard work.
This was more vivid for me this weekend in the Vegas desert heat as I strolled from house to house in various Clark County neighborhoods. But while economists wonder why people vote because it's irrational (one vote is so unlikely to make a difference), volunteering feels more sensible. If each of us can reach ten, twenty, fifty people, and if we can encourage a few extra people to get out and vote, or convince a few undecideds to vote for Obama, then the multiplier effect lends our efforts feel numerically significance.
Andrew Sullivan, writing about the ground game, says Obama's "major enemy is complacency among the young."
That's fair given weak youth turnout historically, but my generation (X) and generation Y are not happy about the label, and I believe the pundits are severely underestimating the youth vote and impact. I can't remember an election in which more people my age and below have been so active, not only contributing money but flying all over the country to do phone banks, voter registration, canvassing, rallying, and everything in between. If the Republicans are counting on youth complacency this time around, they are going to be disappointed. We don't just want to win the election (what Obama dismisses as the 50-plus-1 governing model, referring to the idea that it's enough to win 50% of the country's support plus one additional vote), we want to make states that have always gone red go blue.
Did our efforts this weekend make a difference? Saturday was the first day of early voting in Nevada. After a rally this morning, a local Obama organizer shared some figures with us. ~15,000 early votes were cast on Saturday, and 64% of them went Obama.
16 days to go.

The latest on the Election

Barack Obama is going to air a long-form 30 minute(!) ad on Fox on Oct. 29, and MLB has agreed to shift the start of Game 6, if it's needed, by 15 minutes from 8:20pm to 8:35pm EST to accommodate it. The ad will also air on NBC and CBS. Lest anyone think it was all altruism...

The blessing from MLB clears the way for Fox to air the promo and collect upward of $1 million in ad revenue for the half hour, more than what either CBS or NBC was charging.

Lest any Republicans out there think this is favoritism, note that the NFL moved this season's opening game so it wouldn't interfere with McCain's acceptance of the Republican nomination at the RNC.

I can't recall ever seeing a 30 minute political ad. Very curious. What will the format be? One long speech? A mix of edited footage and talking heads?

***

Sarah Palin is appearing on SNL this weekend. Yep. You betcha.

***

I don't recall watching the Alfred E. Smith Foundation Dinner before, but it surprised me to see McCain and Obama making jokes about issues that seemed to have them exasperated with each other just a day earlier at the final debate.

Both candidates are quite funny, more so than the Thursday SNL in which, on one day turnaround, the SNL crew seem content to re-enact the debate and read most of the same lines that were actually spoken in the debate.

Check it out.

It's all in good fun, but there is some political scoring going on. When Obama jokes around about things like his middle name, or where he was born, or who he pals around with, and when McCain laughs at said jokes, those lines of attack lose a bit of heat.

McCain can be charming when he's willing to use a bit of humor which is why it's been so surprising that he's been so churlish in the debates.

***

McCain finally kept his appointment with David Letterman.

***

Joe the Plumber's story doesn't really check out. He's not a licensed plumber, he's not earning $250K+ (he'd actually save more money under Obama's tax plan under his current income), and he has no specific plans to buy that business he spoke of. He was vetted about as well as Palin.

Not that it's a big deal. Whether Joe the Plumber's story was true or not, he was entitled to ask the question, and Obama answered it. If he was making the $280K he claimed, he would be paying higher taxes on the marginal $30K under Obama's tax plan. I don't think it's a great loss for Obama as most middle class voters aren't worrying about their surplus income above $250K.

Nate Silver profile

NY Magazine profiles Nate Silver, whose hobby has now made him more famous than his day job, at least to the public at large. To me, he's been the guy that's built PECOTA, a baseball forecasting tool, for Baseball Prospectus, a site I've been reading and subscribing to pretty much since it started. But to most people now, he's the guy who built the models powering FiveThirtyEight.com, the thinking man's go-to site for electoral projections.

Silver’s site now gets about 600,000 visits daily. And as more and more people started wondering who he was, in May, Silver decided to unmask himself. To most people, the fact that Poblano turned out to be a guy named Nate Silver meant nothing. But to anyone who follows baseball seriously, this was like finding out that a guy anonymously running a high-fashion Website turned out to be Howard Cosell.

The key insight that led to his unique spin on interpreting the polls:

As the primaries went on, however, Silver, who had been writing an anonymous diary for the liberal Website Daily Kos, made an observation about this year’s voters: While the polls were wobbling wildly state-to-state, the demographic groups supporting each candidate, and especially Clinton and Obama, were remarkably static. He wasn’t the only one who noticed this, of course—it was a major narrative theme of the campaign. One pundit summed it up by saying that Clinton had “the beer track”—blue-collar whites, Latinos, and seniors—while Barack had African-Americans and “the wine track”: young voters and educated whites.

Jay-Z

I went to the re-opening celebration concert for the Hollywood Palladium tonight. Jay-Z performed with an assist from DJ AM and a special guest cameo by T.I.

Between songs, mid-concert, Jay-Z stopped to talk politics. He's clearly an Obama supporter, and he offered his "homeboy" some advice (paraphrased from memory):

"I shouldn't talk about this...but f*** it, I'm an American citizen. Free speech and all that. If I were to give my boy some advice on how to deal with homegirl -- you know, 'you betcha' -- I'd tell him..."

And he jumped straight into "99 Problems":

"If you're havin' girl problems i feel bad for you son

I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one"

Joe the Plumber

The clip which made Joe Wurzelbacher the most famous plumber in America.

Misusage alert: "literally"

Jerry Jones said of Cowboys cornerback Adam "Pacman" Jones, who got in a fight with a bodyguard despite already have been suspended by the NFL previously for misbehavior: "He’s literally on a high wire without a net."

Which sounds dangerous indeed, more so than tempting the NFL to slap him with a further penalty. Though perhaps suspension is a welcome thing, if he was indeed on that high wire without a net.

Read: "He's figuratively on a high wire without a net."

The new Macbook Pro

It's hot. I want one.

Apple has posted a video about the creation of the 13" Macbook that features some footage of the elusive Jonathan Ive ("Jony"), one of the current pantheon of design deities. Can't help but love the way the Brits pronounce aluminum, and watching those machines carve the unibody out of a solid 2.5 pound block of aluminum is engineering porn. Someday I would love to work on the design of a physical product.

I was back at Stanford recruiting last week, and I assign Apple all credit and blame for the dozens of product design majors who visited our table.

Connor

Joannie and Mike were in Temecula this past weekend visiting the folks, so I went down to visit them all and check in on Connor who is now over a year old.

He's still a serious and cautious little guy, but we managed to get a few laughs out of him during the weekend. I learned that he enjoys walking up small hills and mounds. Up and down, up and down. And, for a minute or two, at least, he found the swing set amusing.

By the way, adjustment brushes in Adobe Lightroom 2? Awesome. Worth the price of the upgrade. How long, I wonder, before they migrate to Photoshop?

Watch the third Presidential Debate at Hulu

We'll be carrying the third and final Presidential Debate tomorrow at Hulu. You can watch it live at Hulu, or you can watch it here in the embedded video below, or you can bring it to the masses by embedding it on your own site.

Palin's dangerous rhetoric, McCain's tolerance thereof

Palin's ignorance and lack of qualifications to be our Vice President, let alone President, are a source of both humor and horror, but now that she's been set loose to fan the flames of racism with unsubstantiated rhetoric, I can't look at her without recoiling in anger and disgust. For McCain to tolerate the types of things Palin is saying at campaign stops these days is to ensure that the last thing people remember about his legacy, once he loses this election, is the turn towards the darkside.

I see video of people holding up signs saying that Obama is a Muslim even though he is easily proven not (with all due respect to Muslims, the term is not a slur, though the Republicans have no qualms about using it that way), or equating him to Osama bin Laden and a terrorist, and I mourn for the death of reason. More than that, I fear what some ignorant loonies might do, their passions stirred up by Palin on the campaign trail through her reprehensible wielding of innuendo and slurs. She's an amateur playing with Molotov cocktails, and it needs to stop.

A sample of writing from others on this topic...

George Packer in The New Yorker:

What’s undeniably true is that Republican rallies and the incendiary language of party leaders are stirring up the darker, destructive mob passions that have a long history in American politics. At the very least, the Republican ticket is making sure that, if Obama wins, he’ll be regarded as an illegitimate and dangerous President by thirty or forty per cent of the country.

Palin is too shallow to understand the weapon she’s playing with; she’s just thrilled to be the birthday girl and the object of so much semi-erotic devotion. But McCain knows better. His manner in debates and at rallies tells me that he’s conflicted about the forces his campaign is unleashing. Win or lose, he’s already damaged his cherished reputation beyond repair. But there’s still time for him to show leadership and do what’s necessary. The responsibility lies with him. In his speeches and at the final debate next week, McCain should say: “Barack Obama is a decent man and a good American. I deplore his policies, I doubt his judgment, I don’t think he has the experience to lead the country. But no one who supports me should question my opponent’s patriotism or his right to stand alongside me in this race. I would rather lose than win with the votes of fear-mongers or bigots.”

Hendrik Hertzberg in this week's New Yorker:

Early this month, McCain moved nearly his entire advertising budget into negative territory. But “negative” hardly does justice to the mendacity of the campaign of vilification that bracketed Nashville. “Barack Obama has said that all we’re doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians,” Sarah Palin said the week before. “Such a reckless, reckless comment and untrue comment, again, hurts our cause.” McCain’s wife, Cindy—who, in May, had said, “My husband is absolutely opposed to any negative campaigning at all”—told a rally last week, “The day that Senator Obama decided to cast a vote to not fund my son while he was serving sent a cold chill through my body.” A McCain television spot summed up the line of attack:

Who is Barack Obama? He says our troops in Afghanistan are [Obama’s voice] “just air-raiding villages and killing civilians.” How dishonorable. Congressional liberals voted repeatedly to cut off funding to our active troops, increasing the risk on their lives. How dangerous. Obama and congressional liberals. Too risky for America.

Here is what Obama actually said, fourteen months ago: “We’ve got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.” He was calling for reinforcements, not casting aspersions. And, as McCain must know, the one Senate vote on which the charge of defunding the troops is based has a mirror image. In May of 2007, Obama voted against a troop-funding bill because it did not include steps toward withdrawal from Iraq; two months earlier, McCain had voted against one because it did. In neither case did their parliamentary maneuverings pose the slightest risk to the life of a single soldier.

More from Hertzberg:

The Obama campaign has been spending money on negativity, too, of course—about a third of its advertising outlay. And a few of their ads have been purposely misleading. For example, an Obama radio spot says of McCain, “He’s opposed stem-cell research.” (That too-clever use of a contraction allows the line to be more truthy than true: McCain flip-flopped on embryonic-stem-cell research in 2001.) But there is no equivalence between the two campaigns. If there were, Obama’s ads would be “raising questions” about the other ticket’s “associations.” For example, Todd Palin was a registered member of the Alaskan Independence Party—to which his wife, as governor, has sent friendly greetings—between 1995 and 2002. Four years before Todd joined, the A.I.P.’s founder, Joe Vogler, declared, “The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government,” and added, referring to the Stars and Stripes, “I won’t be buried under their damned flag!” (Sure enough, in 1995, Vogler, after being murdered in connection with an informal transaction involving plastic explosives, was buried in Canada.) Good material for an attack ad there, no? Ditto the fact that during the early nineteen-eighties John McCain sat on the advisory board of General John Singlaub’s U.S. Council for World Freedom—the American outpost of the World Anti-Communist League, a sort of clearing house for former Nazi collaborators, Central American death-squad leaders, and assorted international thugs. And, unlike Obama’s alleged palship with Ayers, these things are true.

The Obama campaign hasn’t gone there, for which it deserves no special credit; it has more to gain from sticking to the realities of the economy and the war. But the other side has been late in having second thoughts. This became frighteningly obvious in recent days, as the rallies McCain and Palin have held around the country turned into bloodcurdling hate-fests. The shouts of supporters in response to the candidates’ attacks on Obama—“Traitor!” “Terrorist!” “Kill him!”—were uttered without rebuke. On CNN the other night, Anderson Cooper asked David Gergen, the soul of moderate concerned citizenship, about “all this anger out there.” Gergen replied, “We’ve seen it in a Palin rally. We saw it at the McCain rally today. . . . There is this free-floating sort of whipping-around anger that could really lead to some violence. I think we’re not far from that.” Suddenly, McCain seems to be worried, too. “I admire Senator Obama and his accomplishments,” he told a restive crowd in Lakeville, Minnesota, last Friday. “I will respect him, and I want everyone to be respectful.” The crowd—the mob—booed. If McCain loses, or even if he wins, his campaign will be remembered as a tragedy in the Aristotelian sense, in which a hero is ruined through some terrible choice of his own. One can only hope that the tragedy will be his alone, and not the nation’s.

Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic:

Attacking Obama for his toleration of Bill Ayers is legitimate. Attacking him for not dissociating himself from Jeremiah Wright earlier is legitimate. Attacking him for raising taxes is fine. But associating him with "terrorists" in the context of large, angry crowds isn't. Calling him a traitor and someone who seeks to put US troops in harm's way in an emotionally fraught time isn't. Not immediately and strongly rebuking crowd cries of "terrorist," "kill him!" and "treason" isn't.

McCain must loudly and clearly disown and disavow this rhetoric soon. Or we all may live to regret it more deeply than we can currently imagine.

Frank Rich in the NYTimes:

At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.

All’s fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor, even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.

We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.

Obama can hardly be held accountable for Ayers’s behavior 40 years ago, but at least McCain and Palin can try to take some responsibility for the behavior of their own supporters in 2008. What’s troubling here is not only the candidates’ loose inflammatory talk but also their refusal to step in promptly and strongly when someone responds to it with bloodthirsty threats in a crowded arena. Joe Biden had it exactly right when he expressed concern last week that “a leading American politician who might be vice president of the United States would not just stop midsentence and turn and condemn that.” To stay silent is to pour gas on the fires.

More from Rich:

No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.

He concludes:

But we’re not at Election Day yet, and if voters are to have their final say, both America and Obama have to get there safely. The McCain campaign has crossed the line between tough negative campaigning and inciting vigilantism, and each day the mob howls louder. The onus is on the man who says he puts his country first to call off the dogs, pit bulls and otherwise.

Joe Klein in his blog for Time:

Watch the tape of the guy screaming, "He's a terrorist!" McCain seems to shudder at that, he rolls his eyes... and I thought for a moment he'd admonish the man. But he didn't. And now he's selling the Ayres non-story full-time. Yes, yes, it's all he has. True enough: he no longer has his honor. But we are on the edge of some real serious craziness here and it would be nice if McCain did the right thing and told his more bloodthirsty supporters to go home and take a cold shower. But McCain hasn't done the right thing all year. His campaign is appalling, as the New York Times editorial board said today--and more, it is a national disgrace.

Greg Sargent in Talking Points Memo:

When is the unhinged frenzy gripping crowds at McCain-Palin gatherings -- not to mention McCain-Palin's own role in stoking that frenzy -- going to become a big story?

Today in Wisconsin, a McCain supporter unleashed a long, unhinged rant in which he blasted the "socialists taking over our country" and referred to Obama and Nancy Pelosi as "hooligans." McCain didn't utter one syllable of objection. In fact, he nodded bemusedly at the "socialist" mention.

And at the end of the man's rant, McCain said that the man was "right."

Related to all this, Christopher Hitchens endorses Obama.

On "the issues" in these closing weeks, there really isn't a very sharp or highly noticeable distinction to be made between the two nominees, and their "debates" have been cramped and boring affairs as a result. But the difference in character and temperament has become plainer by the day, and there is no decent way of avoiding the fact. Last week's so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him.

Hitchens concludes:

The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: "What does he take me for?" Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party's right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama's position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.

It therefore seems to me that the Republican Party has invited not just defeat but discredit this year, and that both its nominees for the highest offices in the land should be decisively repudiated, along with any senators, congressmen, and governors who endorse them.

I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that "issue" I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience. With McCain, the "experience" is subject to sharply diminishing returns, as is the rest of him, and with Palin the very word itself is a sick joke. One only wishes that the election could be over now and a proper and dignified verdict rendered, so as to spare democracy and civility the degradation to which they look like being subjected in the remaining days of a low, dishonest campaign.

Fake celeb Twitter accounts

The use of Twitter for basic info, where you are, what you're doing, is not nearly as amusing as using it as a new comedic form, among which one of the more amusing niches is fake celebrity tweeting.

You know of Fake Sarah Palin by now, but one order higher on the complexity scale of humor is interaction between fake celebrity Twitter accounts.

Here's Fake Megan Fox replying to Fake Michael Bay:

@michael_bay has a saying: "I turn things from boring to awesome. Then I turn them from awesome to Bay."

My favorite fake Michael Bay tweet:

If Im groggy in the am I get a triple venti espresso from starbucks and dump it on the first homeless person I see in downtown LA. It works.

Every character on Mad Men seems to have their own Twitter accounts, though they don't quite do it for me. Part of the charm of those characters is their entrenchment in that time and the inscrutability of their inner lives, so the self-conscious and reflective nature of a Twitter account doesn't fit (AMC briefly had Twitter take them down, though they've since been restored).

New Macbook Pros

Daring Fireball has, via Engadget, details on the new Macbook Pros to be announced today (which, to be fair, includes some speculation). I'd be surprised if his report was far off from the truth. Most of the updates are minor and/or cosmetic, like the switch to the Macbook Air-style keyboard, a new single-piece aluminum chassis, and a clickable glass trackpad. The biggest deal, to me, is the inclusion of two Nvidia GPUs, the 9400M and the 9600M GT.

Selfishly, the more people out there with computers with modern, high-powered GPU's, the smoother Hulu videos will play. Some users write in complaining about videos that stutter, and in most cases it's either a computer that can't keep up or problems in the network. The videos, I can assure you, play fine--it's an easy thing for us to test in-house to remove the variable of the network and the computer from the equation to test the underlying video.

Happy Columbus Day

I would be pleased to send this e-card to some AIG executives if someone would let me know which golf resort they're partying at now.

Malcolm Gladwell resurfaces

Today's assigned reading for the blogosphere is Malcolm Gladwell's feature article in this week's New Yorker, "Late Bloomers," subtitled "Why do we equate genius with precocity?"

It may be an excerpt from or offshoot of his upcoming book Outliers: The Story of Success.

I have not read it yet but will visit it at lunch.

Crawford

Our first movie premiere at Hulu is the documentary Crawford, about the effect on the small Texan town when George W. Bush moves in.

Producer and Director David Modigliani was kind enough to answer a few questions I sent his way, and you can read that Q&A here. A taste:

Q: We're used to seeing states divided into red and blue on electoral maps, and in press coverage of each election. How do you think Crawford helps us to understand the reality of that view of the U.S.?

A: I think the film shows that the US is a purple country, even in Crawford, Texas. It behooves each party to demonize and stereotype the other -- to draw divisive lines and oversimplify things into a lame dichotomy. I think there's this notion that small-town "Red State America" is filled with ignorant people who are somehow "other" than people in other parts of the country. When I first arrived in Crawford, I had some of those preconceptions. Instead, I found people who were warm, hospitable, bright and funny. They had political viewpoints across the board, but -- and this sounds trite -- they were people, above all else. I would say to "Blue State America" that people in small towns are folks to engage, rather than to write off. If the political parties and their rampant advertising -- and the media and its lust for conflict -- would get out of the way, I think we'd see more connection and union in the country, which would allow us, in turn, to face our problems together instead of across divisive lines of fire.

Stephen Colbert to appear in Amazing Spider-Man #573

I didn't even realize that Stephen Colbert is running for President in the Marvel Universe, but now he's making his first appearance in Amazing Spider-Man #573.

There will be a variant cover featuring Colbert swinging through the city with Spider-Man in tow (as seen to the left).

This is sure to get play on The Colbert Report, and I'll try to remember to link to the clip once it appears on Hulu.

In the meantime, I'm surprised by how many serial comic books are still in circulation. I suppose they serve the same purpose as patent applications, allowing Marvel to license properties out for movies and toys. The stories themselves matter little now, which is ironic since Hollywood turns to comic books for story franchises. Comic book characters are like pre-existing concepts which, in their built-in awareness, offset enough marketing spend to justify hanging just about any plot on them.

What's in a brand name?

High viscosity chamois cream didn't sound snappy enough, I suppose, so this new entrant into the chamois cream market called it's product dznuts and took the tagline "protect your junk."

The Wire, the complete series, on Blu-Ray

On Dec 9, the complete run of The Wire, all five seasons, comes out on Blu-Ray. Those of you who watched The Wire don't need my endorsement. Those who haven't and own a Blu-Ray player? Treat yourself to a holiday gift of the best television series, or telenovel, ever.

"The Talk"

The usual e-mail from political campaigns are all similar - some pseudo-personalized message from someone associated with the campaign, e.g. Biden or Gore - ending with a plea for a donation, in an amount that seems related to the size of your previous contribution. Or a call to join a phone bank or swing state canvas trip.

The latest e-mail from the Obama campaign takes a different approach. It appeals for supporters to convert family members.

If your family isn't already supporting Barack, it's time for you to have "The Talk."

With so many rumors and misperceptions out there, it's incredibly important that you sit down with parents or other family members. Tell them who Barack is, what he stands for, and why you're supporting him.

You may be the only person who can convince them.

But it can be difficult to bring up the subject, so here are a few tips:

• Send an email. You can scroll down for some talking points, but feel free to add your personal touch.
• Breaking the ice can be hard. Start by asking if they saw the debate on Tuesday and what they thought about it.
• Have some information handy. We have one-page summaries of Barack's positions on various issues. Look for the issues you know are important to your family.
• Share Barack's speech from the Democratic National Convention or Meet Barack, a video about who Barack Obama is, where he comes from, and what his values are.

For more resources, and to share your story about talking to family members, go to:

http://my.barackobama.com/thetalk

Earlier this year, as one national leader after another announced support for Barack, there was a common refrain -- they said their kids persuaded them that Barack was the right candidate to bring about real change.

Family members talking to one another about Barack is one of the ways this movement has grown so large. Even if your parents are already convinced, talk to your grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Once it was parents who had to have the embarrassing "Talk" with their kids about the birds and the bees. Now the tables have turned, and it's the children who have to sit their parents down to broach politics.

Will it work? I suppose I'll find out Oct 17-19, when I head out to Las Vegas to canvas for Obama. Will those from my parents' generation want to hear from people of mine, or will it seem presumptuous? Why do I suspect I'll feel like I'm introducing a girlfriend to strict parents?

Once more into the mud, dear friends, once more

Dan Balz writes about "The Legacy of Character Attacks" in The Washington Post:

Because he is losing right now, McCain is on a more urgent mission to turn around his campaign. Because he is under attack, Obama feels the need to show he won't let his rival push him around. The effect is the same, which is to degrade the political dialogue at a moment when the nation faces some of the most difficult challenges in a generation or more.

In a month, one of these candidates will have won and the other will be asked to help rally behind the new leader to tackle the economic crisis. That would have been easier if the dialogue had not turned as it has the past few weeks.

When the final showdown came down to McCain and Obama, one might have held out hope that this Election would be different, that it would be a clean fight. But it only takes one corner willing to punch below the belt before everyone wades into the mud. Voters are partially to blame, because they are susceptible to Swift Boating and other such unsubstantiated attack methods.

McCain, as the underdog, initiated, as is logical, and he and his campaign have been stepping up the character attacks in recent days as Obama opens a gap. Obama and his camp have responded with their own videos, like the Keating Five video, though a good number of his ads still focus on the issues, where Democrats are seen as stronger.

Will the Ayers attacks and their like work again? I hope not, but I'm fearful to see the depths to which McCain and Palin and their campaign team will sink in the remaining weeks.

UPDATE: The NYTimes Public Editor chides the Times for feeding into this phenomenon by spending too many inches of column space on negative campaigning issues, the headline using the same term as I did, "mud," to mark this phase of the election: "Urgent Issues, Buried in the Mud"

Preview "Tell Tale Signs"

Until the CDs are released next week, you can preview Bob Dylan's upcoming bootleg 2-CD album Tell Tale Signs at NPR.org.